


All Too Familiar

by oldmythologies



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: 5 Things, 5+1 Things, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Loneliness, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Shiro (Voltron)-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-05
Updated: 2017-07-05
Packaged: 2018-11-23 15:26:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11405223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oldmythologies/pseuds/oldmythologies
Summary: 5 times Shiro couldn't sleep and the 1 time he could.





	All Too Familiar

**Author's Note:**

  * For [buttered_onions](https://archiveofourown.org/users/buttered_onions/gifts).



> A solid chunk of this story came straight from Miss Onions' head. She is a fabulous perfect human and this is for her.

**i.**

Shiro had been in space the longest, he had seen aliens up close and personal, and by this logic, he should be the quickest to believe and absorb the fact that they were now the pilots of ancient pseudo-magical robot lions. It didn’t quite work out like that. He had piloted an ancient pseudo-magical robot lion and formed the head of an ancient pseudo-magical robot man and destroyed a battleship full of aliens that he had been captured by a year before. He had these vague memories of them: purple people who wore masks in his memories, bright lights, a whole lot of yelling; it felt more like some weird dream than reality. He couldn’t pinpoint any solid event, any moment past the moon. Even Kerberos, the time before Kerberos, was a bit fuzzy.

He walked down the corridor towards his new quarters, a room he had yet to see but was told would be waiting for him alongside the other paladins’ rooms. His was the first room he stumbled upon, the closest to the bridge. Perks of being the “leader”, he presumed. It slid open without his prompting.

Dumb pseudo-magic, always knowing where he was.

The lights faded up as he entered the room. The color of the light was much bluer than he’d expected it to be.

He didn’t know what he’d expected.

_Purple. Red. Blacks and grays. Low glows._

What? He shook his head of the image. That didn’t make any sense.

The room reminded him of those early sci-fi movies and shows, pre-Star Wars, where there was this idea that in the future everything would be made of smooth lines and pulsing lights: a land where rust didn’t exist and food (goo) would just come out of the walls. It reminded him of Star Trek in a way that his initial space travel never could. This place was a fantasy, one that fulfilled every wish he’d had as a child. It was his everything; he didn’t know why that realization left a bitter taste in his mouth.

_The bed._ Now that was a fantasy. He sagged in relief. He didn’t realize how tired he was until he saw it. It just looked so _soft_ all covered in blankets and pillows. He peeled off his vest and boots, letting the undershirt and pants remain; his new body was something to deal with another time.

He fell face first into the mattress, expecting his head to hit the pillow and to immediately pass out like he had in the garrison. He expected to melt into the soft materials, to moan in relief as the tension left his body. That’s what always happened before. He _remembered_ that. There was so little he solidly remembered, and the feeling of getting home after a long day, of taking off his shoes and wiggling his toes under the blanket was one of those things. It felt like a betrayal.

The bedding didn’t cocoon him; it suffocated. On the first inhale, he felt the fabric stifle the air on its way to his lungs. He immediately flipped over onto his back, pulling in a long breath and staring at the ceiling, so close, too close, lit only by the fading glow of these automatic Altean lights. The pillow perfectly supported his neck, holding him in place. His spine didn’t understand it; he couldn’t figure out what was wrong but it just _was_.

It was too much. Too much contact, too much something. He should move. He really should move. The bed made his skin itch.

He refused to move.

He was normal.

He had to be normal. He was a normal person who was comfortable in a soft bed, shoes off, wiggling his toes.

He remembered being normal. That wasn’t too long ago, was it? It felt like yesterday. All he had was _then_ , and _then,_ he was normal. He was comfortable in a soft bed. He always was.

He always had been. Shiro refused to recognize the past tense in that statement. It felt so recent. He couldn’t be different from _then_. That meant that the past year had happened.

He clenched his teeth and focused on the one memory, the day where his schedule had him tutoring and testing and running the sims over and over again, the day where he hadn’t been off his feet in hours and he _remembered_ the feeling of falling, of hitting the mattress with an _oof_ , a sigh, and nothing else.

He refused to admit that the kid who had left for Kerberos was not the man that came back. Getting down on the floor, wrapping himself in a blanket and leaning against the wall, facing the door, was admitting that he was changed. He refused to be the animal they made him, and if that meant staring at the ceiling, trying to recreate a feeling long gone, then he would stare at the ceiling all god damn night.

In his mind, he tried to recreate the smell of his dorm, of Matt’s constant sweat covered hastily with deodorant, of the bleach they used to clean literally every surface because they didn’t know any better. He breathed in and tried to smell the cheap fabric softener the garrison provided, pure soap and nothing else, but comforting in his mind’s eye. There was another smell, one he didn’t feel in that moment, but looking back, it was everywhere. It was light, not quite musky but on its way. It smelled like cheap, over-perfumed shampoo, like early spring and wet earth and oil. It was his own smell.

He didn’t smell like that anymore. He almost gagged at the realization, no longer breathing in memories but the here and now, this disgusting smell of dirt and sweat, blood and decay filling his nostrils, covering up the pleasant, dusty, floral nothingness that was the castle.

He scrambled off the bed, falling to the floor tangled up in the blankets, trying to get away from that awful smell, the one that was all rolled up with crowds cheering and muffled roars and pain.

He couldn’t get away. The smell was everywhere, it was everything. He _was_ the dirt and sweat and blood and decay, the sharp metal dulled from use, the cold puddles and harsh floor, the overwhelming door and soft moaning coming from down the hall.

It was inside of him. He _was_ all those things and so much more and nothing more.

He didn’t know where it came from.

He didn’t know who had experienced it; surely not him.

He didn’t know why he couldn’t just go back, why he couldn’t smell like a teen who used cheap deodorant and spent his time reading every book he could get his hands on, in the garage, covered in oil, the teen who sparred for fun and not for his life.

He didn’t know who he was anymore, but as Shiro shivered on the cold metal floor, pushing himself up against the wall, wrapping himself in the blanket and curling in on himself, he realized that he could never be that teen again.

 

**ii.**

It wasn’t like floating; it was never like floating. It was grounded, except the ground was cold and smooth and sharp or made of dirt and smelled like blood. The ground was harsh but he was tied to it. There was the constant upwards pull, the part of him that _wanted_ to just float, but the shackles around his ankles kept him down.

The sky he looked up to was always changing.

A sunrise over a mountain.

Colors warping in and out of reality.

A cold moon in the middle of space.

It should have been odd to look at the world like this, to see planets morph into each other every time he looked away, but some part of him decided that up was better than down. Down was pain. He could feel flashes of hot and cold, pain as razors dug into his ankles, but he kept looking up. The pull was getting stronger. It wanted him to float and he wanted to go with it.

He did.

The shackles were gone and he didn’t care about where they went. They were gone and that’s just how it was. The stars and the moon and the mountains pulled him up, away from it all, and it was like his skin finally breathed. His muscles released and he could feel something. He was falling he was flying he was floating, up and up until it was just him and an ever-changing nothingness of color and shapes and empty.

He was bare, and for the first time he could remember, he was free.

The ground sent up whispers, little voices that snuck into his ears and begged him to _please come back_ and _we miss you_ , a constant hiss. He pushed it back.

_I’m free. Finally. Leave me alone._

_You’ll never be free, Champion._

The whispers curled around his ankles and the ground rushed up to meet him.

His eyes snapped open. He was curled in a corner of his cell.

Was this his cell? It was warm. And spacious. That didn’t make sense. He was never warm.

He was never free.

_I’ll never be free_.

This wasn’t right. The blanket wasn’t supposed to be soft against his skin; it was supposed to be rough and thin and let the cold penetrate. He threw the offending object off, untangling it from his legs and throwing it across the room, a distance that was much too long. He expected it to hit some kind of wall and suddenly reality would snap back into view, that he’d be greeted with the familiar sight of a purple red glow passing under the door and through the barred window.

The blanket sailed across the blue tinted room. Nothing changed.

This was a trick. This was some sort of new _trick_ , trying to make him feel safe so they could come in here again and take him to go fight whatever unwilling participant they had scrounged up for the day or shove him back into _her_ hands.

This was _her_ work. She was the only one that could make him feel warm without any sort of blanket in a cell barely insulated from the pure frost of space. She was the only one who could make him see something in so much clarity; she was the only one who _would_ do this.

It was just her brand of torture to dangle something so beautiful in front of him, a warm room full of blankets and soft things and the feeling of safety, to let him fall into the illusion, let him sleep, monitor his brain waves and then pull him out with electricity or a slap or her _toys_ , too terrifying to think about even further.

He wouldn’t let her win. He couldn’t let her win, because then he’d have nothing left to fight against. It would be over.

Any minute now, she would come through that door, the door that was much closer than it looked, and he’d be ready. He’d be waiting. He refused to let the warmth seep into his bones and lull him back down to sleep. He knew where he was. No matter what she was doing in his head, he _knew_ . He wasn’t safe; he was never safe. _Safety_ didn’t exist anymore. He didn’t know how to be safe.

It had been so long. He just had to hold out, just a little bit longer.

Just until the blanket he’d thrown across the room dissolved into the thin sheet he was used to, until the walls closed back in on him and he got her foul claws out of his head.

Any minute now.

Even the metal against his back was warm and inviting. _How did she make metal soft?_

Any minute now.

Any minute now it would all fade away and go back to normal. Normal would be better than this. Normal was boring and he missed boring. _Normal_ held the same old song and dance, the usual fear and the usual hunger.

_This_ was wrong. It was hyper vigilance, it was adrenaline and anger, but it wasn’t fear.

Any minute now.

The blue lights rose, so different from the purple and red he was used to. He liked the colors. They felt familiar. He knew these colors, he knew that they somehow meant sunrise and morning and clean and breathing and freedom.

_I can never be free._

In the lights, he saw his own sunrise and Matt, and chasing lights down empty, dark corridors.

He saw images leaving his head, he saw himself, curled in a ball, staring at the door. What was he doing like that? He needed to get up, take a shower, go about his day.

_Never free._

What was he talking about? Not free? He had to get to training, he had work to do, always work to do.

Always work to do.

Why was he shaking? Shiro held out his hands in front of him and just looked, watched them tremble. He cocked his head, confused. His hands stilled under his gaze.

Why was his blanket so far away? He stood up, steadied the rest of his quivering body with a stern thought, picked it up, and made the bed.

His shower was short and cold, but he couldn’t tell. He told his arm to reach for the shampoo and for a brief second he looked at the metal arm with confusion before he remembered what it was. _Oh._ He grabbed the shampoo.

He quickly got dressed, pulled on his armor and stood in front of the door. Why was he so afraid? He knew what was on the other side, of course he did. He knew where he was.

_Any minute now._

The door hissed open and he was greeted with the familiar corridor. He let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding, sagging back into himself.

He clenched his jaw and headed to the training room.

 

**iii.**

Lance had just brushed it off; he’d said that it was the castle. Shiro didn’t eject that man into space, the castle did. It was poisoned, he’d said. The castle was poisoned and it made Shiro eject the man into space. The castle had forced those thoughts into Shiro’s head. The castle filled him up with self hate and fear and doubt and punched the holes in his walls and squeezed the air out of his lungs until all that was left was a monster, broken and reformed.

The door closed behind him and he slumped against it, sliding down until his body thudded to the ground. He pulled his knees up to his chest and let his head fall back. He kept his eyes closed and swallowed.

He was a monster. The castle was a monster? If Sendak was the poison, what part of him told Shiro to kill?

_He’s already defeated me._

No. Yes? He killed. He hated killing. His hands were sticky with blood, blue and black and green mixed with his own red. The blood of his opponent was beautiful: iridescent and glowing. Watching them bleed out on the ground in front of him was one of the most glorious things he’d ever seen. The pool of shimmering mercury spread like tendrils, snaking in-between the dirt and making its way to Shiro’s feet. They hadn’t had any armor. Sometimes they had armor. This one didn’t. He wondered why.

Breathing heavily over the body, he watched his own ichor fall from a gash in his forehead and into the silver. It swirled together. The liquid lost its shine. He’d messed it up again. He always messed it up. He broke everything he touched.

The glass shattered on his fist, his blood seeping into the cracks.

He killed the alien.

Then and now, he was a monster.

_Did you really think a monster like you could be a Voltron Paladin?_

No.

He didn’t deserve to be here. They didn’t know. How could he tell them? How could he tell these children that he was a murderer?

He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He couldn’t tell them anything. This was a matter held between him and his head, clutched to his chest, pressing down on his heart. He and his problems were his own. He couldn’t add that weight to anyone else. It wouldn’t be fair to. It was his fault that he was like this, fingernails digging into his scalp, biting down on the inside of his cheek. He tasted blood: red blood, not silver and shining or blue or green or vivid violet.

He couldn’t tell them, but he was sure they knew. Maybe that’s why he felt so alone? Maybe that was why he was so far removed from the people who were the closest to him, the only people he knew. He was alone.

He was alone.

Was he always alone? He remembered other people with him. Who were they? Amber eyes. Or were they more like honey? What color were they? Was it brown, amber, gold, honey, or yellow? Bright yellow. They penetrated the dark. That should have been a comfort, anything cutting through the inky black that was his memory should have been a comfort. These eyes were yellow like a coyote hunting in the night. He felt those eyes hit his heart and it collapsed and he was falling again, down through the empty pit of his mind, haunted, feeling the yellow eyes pop up in the corner of his vision. Every time he tried to look his body wouldn’t respond. His joints were locked. Despite the fact that his eyes were closed, he could still see it all. His arms—his arm?—were pinned to his sides.

His body wouldn’t even let him tremble. Instead it was waves and waves and waves of tension, right arm clenching and releasing but never releasing. He tried to let go of the fist he had made. It wouldn’t let up. He felt the nails dig into his palm.

That didn’t make sense. He could feel those same nails cutting into the skin on his head, threading through his damp hair. He felt it. He felt the arms at his side and on his head and Sendak’s rifling through the shattered bits of memory in front of him. It was too much and not enough and nothing that he needed.

If he could only unclench. Release. If he could only pull the claws out of his head and his palm and himself, he’d be okay.

_Broken and reformed_.

He was broken. Who had broken him? He tried to breathe but the shattered pieces of himself got stuck in his airways and choked him. He swallowed the blood: red blood, not silver and shining or blue or green or vivid violet. It tasted familiar. He lost a tooth once. Many times? It tasted like lost teeth and slashed faces and adrenaline.

Deep breaths. The glass in his lungs had disappeared. The taste of blood didn’t.

Deep breaths. The arms fell away from his sides and he could finally focus on the pin pricks of pain in his scalp. Ten fingers. He could feel ten fingers. One set felt _wrong_ , but what didn’t? Everything felt wrong and broken.

Sendak was wrong. He was never broken and reformed, never stronger and better. They may have beaten him, but they never won. They had never made him stronger, better, and he would never be a weapon. He never could be a weapon. They had beaten him and they had broken him and then she _left_ him broken.

He was still broken; he was still alone.

He pulled his fingers away and tried not to look at the wet, dark, stains at their ends. Blood on his hands was all too familiar. He didn’t stand up, but his legs sprawled in front of him. He wiped the tears from his eyes with the back of his left hand. All too familiar.

He let out a shuddering sigh.

Sometimes he wished he didn’t have to be so alone.

 

**iv.**

It wasn’t violent, waking up from nightmares. The first few times had been a shock: hitting his head on the wall, jumping to standing, panicking at the feeling of liquid trickling down his face. Sometimes it still was terrifying, waking up and just _knowing_ that he wasn’t safe. Sometimes it still took a few minutes for him to realize that no, the feeling wasn’t blood, but sweat. No one was here to fight, and for all intents and purposes, he was safe.

The first few nights, every single time he woke up was like that. He would deny the nightmares, pretend they never happened, pretend that he was okay. Always pretend he was okay. He’d close his eyes again and then wake up half an hour later, still exhausted and more terrified than before.

He was better at it now. Not good, but better. He would wake up quickly and instead of leaping into attack mode, he would try to count his breaths until they calmed.

On the occasions that his breathing exercises worked and placed him back in the present, Shiro would turn on the lights. They faded up slowly, like the sunrise, but the colors were all wrong. Shiro chocked it up to the atmosphere on Altea being different, filtering the light so that it faded straight from the dark of night to bright blue to the light color of the sky, all too similar to that of Earth. He missed the sunrises over the desert in the garrison, the ones that would start with a faint yellow glow on the horizon, sat on top of the mountains, a thin bright line silhouetting their shape as they reached up to the fading stars. The orange would come next, filling in all the places that the yellow had vacated as it crawled up the sky. The world would briefly turn pink and red for a few glorious moments before it was engulfed with the first few rays of the sun peaking over the mountain, casting everything in highlights and shadows of the starkest contrast.

He wondered if Allura and Coran liked to watch the lights fade up like this and if it hurt to remember that they could never see their sunrise again. Through it all, through every alien attack and every jump across galaxies, the knowledge that somewhere out there, his planet still existed and was thriving kept him fighting.

That, and he didn’t know what else to do.

Sometimes, living in the past helped. It helped to remember all those sunrises, sneaking out with Matt or Keith on hover bikes and climbing to the top of the mesas to watch the light creep closer and closer. Sometimes it only served to remind him of who he no longer was.

Either way, the first step was always to wake up. The sun woke up every day without fail. No matter what happened, the sun would always rise, and Shiro would always wake up with it. In space, it was easier to pretend it was normal for the sun to rise at four AM.

The next step was always cleaning. He would stand up from his piles of blankets on the floor, crack his back, and breathe. He would pick up his bedding and remake the bed as if that was where he slept. He’d take an absurdly long shower, care of the castle’s infinite hot water, and shave. Looking at his scars in the mirror, towel around his waist, Shiro often wished that the Alteans hadn’t managed to engineer out that whole “foggy mirror” problem that plagued Earth. He tried to keep his eyes glued to his face, but even that was no safe haven, broken by the ugly scar that ran through the middle of it. He tried not the think of what he looked like before.

He’d brush his teeth, splash water on his face one more time, and then immediately change into his armor or comfortable wear; it depended on what kind of nightmare it had been. On the really bad days, it was always armor.

He started with running. Even before the garrison, this had always been his safe place. He could just _go_ , no one cared where he went and no one followed. He ran down long abandoned hallways of the once thriving castle, lights fading up before him and evaporating in his wake. He was the firefly running through the castle, bringing just a flash of fire to the forgotten city that fell away as he kept going.

He eagerly waited for each bulb in front of him to turn on as he approached and dreaded the day he would be running into the black, no light to guide him.

He did that enough as it was.

He would take a different path every day, sometimes following the lights and sometimes making them follow him, but they would also lead him back to a well known wing before he slowed down and let himself just walk for a few moments, mind full of nothing but the lights. Sometimes he ran into Coran in those few moments. The two men would nod at each other; it was never something they acknowledged. They never spoke and they never moved to greet each other further. It was just a locked gaze and a solemn nod; that motion showed more than they could ever say.

Shiro landed back in his room, tired once more, but too afraid to close his eyes. Afraid wasn’t the right word. Wary? Cynical? Disheartened. It was some mix of emotions that kept him from closing his eyes because he simultaneously knew that sleep wouldn’t be kind nor welcoming, that the back of his head was still filled with the dark thoughts that kept trying to dig their sharp claws into his skin, to pull their way up and to rip him apart. Turning his back on them was a weakness he would never allow himself.

The cleaning and the running were always consistent in his routine. It gave him the chance to wash away his sorrows and run away from the bits that clung to him still. It was the events after he returned that varied night to night. If the memories were still holding on too tight, he’d do pull ups. It helped to give himself a purpose and when he was feeling weak, he just needed to prove to himself that he could do fifty push ups in row.

When the nightmares had been sufficiently chased away and if it wasn’t yet nearing breakfast for the rest of the castle, he could read. In the castle’s library, Pidge had dug up volumes and volumes of Altean legends that were translated into their database. He’d spend hours sitting on the bed—never laying down, never sleeping—combing through their versions of history and fiction and myth. As a kid, he’d love to read. Books inspired him to become the astronaut that he became and books got him there.

It was the one thing he knew he enjoyed before and knew he could enjoy after. He’d get lost in the stories until they became him.

Mornings after he got to read were the best. He got to walk to breakfast feeling like a knight of old. He held his head high; he smiled at his team; and sometimes he didn’t even feel all that tired.

 

**v.**

The castle always smelled vaguely like flowers and dust; it wasn’t unpleasant in the slightest, but the dust smelled more like nothing and the flowers weren’t anything he’d ever experienced before. He honestly wasn’t even sure if it was floral. Maybe on Altea the flowers smelled like roast beef did on his planet.

The thought almost made him chuckle into the soft fabric pressed against his nose.

What did this feel like? Cashmere? No, not cashmere. It wasn’t wooly enough. It wasn’t quite smooth either. Not like satin and not like silk. He rubbed the fabric between his thumb and fingers, trying to find each thread. The tears were drying against his face and the breaths were finally starting to come slower. Every once a while they would stutter.

Whenever that happened, he’d just turn further into the mass of cloth at his back and feel how each of the different materials rubbed against his face. They were all absurdly soft. The Alteans may not have known food, but they knew fabric.

He decided that this one was most like velvet. It was the softest, smoothest velvet he’d ever felt. In the dark, he wondered what it looked like. He pulled up from his mind all the images of fancy ladies from TV shows and movies back on Earth, trying to decide what era it might be from.

He drew a blank. Maybe something ridiculously shiny and iridescent? Something he couldn’t even imagine, probably. That was one of the things that shocked him most about all the people and things he’d seen since leaving Earth. Everything was the same and everything was so different. They all had fabrics, but all of them were made from different plants and dyes and through different methods. It was hard to find anything familiar to pull him home. Even the clothes on his back weren’t his own.

Nothing was his. He had nothing. He was nothing.

His own thoughts caught him off guard sometimes. His own thoughts liked to reach up from the muck, grab his head, and pull him back down, face first.

His breath caught and he pulled the fabric further into his fist.

_Just like velvet_.

Deep breaths.

He wished there was more to touch. There was only so long he could convince himself that he was home. Hiding in a closet in a spaceship castle was the closest he could get, but it didn’t bring him there. There was only so long that he could convince himself that the fabric in his hand came from home and not from a near extinct alien civilization, developed over generations and generations, all leading up to this.

_This._ Here, he was the alien, hiding in the closet, pretending he was home. He was all too good at pretending.

Tonight, at dinner, he’d walked in and there was only one chair left. Only one. Lance had moved from his usual spot at the end of the table to go sit by Hunk and nerd out about some TV show from Earth. He’d taken Shiro’s usual spot.

Its back faced the door. Shiro paused as he entered the room. He swallowed, fighting against the strings trying to pull him back, away from the vulnerability that sitting in that chair offered. He knew what happened when you didn’t know who was in a room. Killers only ever snuck up from behind.

He remembered being the one who hid in the shadows, who waited to see the enemy’s back before attacking. He remembered the weak spots; this was one of them.

Shiro forced his feet forward. One and then the other. Step, step, step. Just a few. Suddenly he was next to the chair. He forced himself to nod; he didn’t smile. No one noticed his microscopic tremors. He sat down and took another breath. In and out.

All through dinner, he didn’t say a word, but no one noticed.

Progress.

Here, he at least had something to focus on that wasn’t the terrors that found him almost every night. He didn’t have to think about the weird amalgamations of his friends and monsters that liked to stalk his mind and remind him that he was nothing. He was less than nothing; he was something that used to be.

_No,_ Shiro caught himself. He was more than that. He was more. He was here, and he could still feel and touch and care and _do_.

They had finally gone up a level against the gladiator that day. He was so proud of them. The things that his team had accomplished, in spite of his shoddy leadership, were amazing.

Hunk got more and more confident every single day. What had once been a stuttering boy was growing into an assertive man. He knew what he wanted, what he was good at, and wasn’t afraid to be good at those things anymore.

Pidge was pulling herself more and more into the group. She didn’t think she was alone anymore. Her plans included them all now, and although she was no less determined to find her family, she was happy to save the universe in the process.

Lance had finally found his thing, and he was damn good at it. His smiles were becoming less forced and more natural. He didn’t hit on everything he saw; he was learning to love himself and Shiro was so damn proud.

Keith. Shiro could barely remember the freshman he’d met his senior year at the garrison. The man he knew now was so much more. He still kept his secrets, Shiro wasn’t sure he’d ever completely let them go, but he was starting to think with his head instead of his heart, he wasn’t going to punch anyone who gave him a wrong look. He was an adult. Shiro couldn’t wait until he led the team.

Shiro was so proud of them. He watched them become the beautiful people they were now.

He couldn’t wait until they finally let him go.

 

**+i.**

The RoBeast slammed into Voltron like a battering ram; it made sense, considering the massive spiked horns sticking out of its front.

Shiro heard groans of discomfort through the coms.

“Everyone alright?” Hunk yelled before Shiro had the chance to.

“Ow,” Lance moaned.

“Been better,” Pidge responded.

Keith just grunted.

“Keith?” Shiro yelled into the screens, frantically searching for Keith’s life signs.

“I’m good,” he responded quickly, hearing Shiro’s panic.

Shiro breathed. “We can beat this. We get rid of the horns first. Keith, you ready?”

“I’m ready.” Shiro could hear Keith’s grin.

Shiro closed his eyes and focused on their connection. Short little aches emanated from each point of light in his mind, but even that was overtaken by their sheer determination as they all put their power into one single task. He loved that he got to say it.

“Form Blazing Sword!” he shouted and just like that, the sword appeared, alight in his right hand.

Keith did the rest, as he always did with the sword, and the towering robot in front of them lost its horns, eyes going dim, metal falling to the ground and shattering upon impact.

Pidge was the first to react. “Uh, metal shouldn’t do that.”

“I don’t think it’s metal.” Hunk agreed.

The monster shuddered and fell into dust.

“Be ready,” Shiro warned. He felt Lance slide his leg back, putting Voltron into a more stable fighting stance.

_Good._

It came as no surprise when the pieces trembled in the dirt and lifted into the air. They were prepared for the ram to reform and to run this whole song and dance again. They didn’t expect the floating chunks of debris to shoot at them as if from a canon.

“Shields!” Shiro yelled, and Pidge barely got it up in time. She grunted at the impact of the first piece and yelled at the second.

She couldn’t take much more of this.

“Voltron, split and stay evasive. Pidge, get behind us and give your lion a break.”

He didn’t need to say he wanted to keep her safe; she already knew. With them, the care always worked better when it was unspoken.

Voltron split into five equal parts but the mind link remained. He felt Pidge’s pain and Keith’s anger and Hunk’s worry and Lance’s determination.

“Lance?” he asked just as the first piece of shrapnel hit his lion. Shiro bit his lip when his head was slammed back against the headrest.

Hunk yelled when it was his turn to get hit.

“I can freeze it,” he yelled, “I just need it all in one place!”

Okay. Shiro could make that happen.

Lance and Keith got hit right as Shiro felt his second impact. He felt Black’s pain vaguely in his mind when he heard something crack in her hull alongside his helmet.

“Keith, Hunk, Pidge, we need it to focus fire on one point,” he began, “and we can let that point be me.”

Before Shiro could continue with his dumb ass self-sacrificial stupid plan, Keith interrupted. “Shut up. We’ll stay evasive in a smaller area and share the hits. That work, Lance?”

Hunk whimpered.

“Yeah, it should.” Lance said.

Shiro chewed on his lip before nodding. “If you guys are ready, let’s do it. Let’s circle the peak.”

With that, Shiro urged Black to the highest spire on the desert planet, a piece of rock that reached much further into the sky than it should have been able to. He caught a piece of shrapnel and dodged right as he reached it and had to watch as it collided with the rock that had spent eons forming to become the wonder it was. The spire cracked and tumbled. This time, Shiro didn’t have the time to dodge and boulders rained onto black. His view screen cracked.

“Shiro!” Keith called into the coms.

“I’m good,” he grunted, swallowing the blood. It tasted all too familiar. He choked on his own thoughts, pulling up the throttle as black stuttered in the air. “A little slow, but we’ll be okay. Stick with the plan.”

Hunk, Keith, and Pidge started obediently shooting at the pieces of shrapnel, drawing the fire, as Lance got far enough away for the pieces of beast to lose interest. They were quickly grouping up, making it harder and harder for his paladins to dodge and stay safe. He felt his heart skip a bit each time one of them got hit, pushing Black to her limits, slowly chugging back up.

Lance started charging his shot.

“Paladins, get out of the way!”

The three darted away from the cluster they’d formed as Lance’s beam of frost hit the location they’d just been, leaving a mass of ice the size of three lions floating above Shiro.

It started falling and Shiro closed his eyes, hoping Black would be okay, urging her to move as far out of the way as she could in this slower, damaged state. Something collided with him, not from above but from the side. He opened his eyes to see Red through the cracked window get barely clipped by the ice.

Keith shouted wordlessly before grumbling something about “dumb stupid self sacrificial dumbass.”

Shiro smiled. “Thanks.”

The ice tumbled down the side of the spire and lay still in the valley it landed in.

Their collective sigh of relief could be heard in both their helmets and their minds. Lance was the first to speak.

“Anyone else really want a nap?”

Shiro chuckled. “Let’s go home.”

* * *

 

They weren’t quite greeted with a “nap” when they got back, back Coran like to call it that.

“Oh my word!” he’d exclaimed. “You five look ready for quite the cryonap! Sounds lovely! I’ll scrub the pods for you, be back in a tick!”

He disappeared as quickly as he’d come, leaving the paladins dragging their feet and panting in their armor. Shiro tried not to breathe too hard. The little something poking into his lung hurt too much. Breathing too hard was probably bad. He ignored the part of his mind that knew what a cracked rib felt like and what the punctured lung it could lead to felt like. _Not good,_ his mind told him. Not good.

Lance was grinning, arms slung over Pidge on one side and around Hunk on the other.

“We,” he paused for a breath, “are _the coolest!_ ” he hollered.

Pidge and Hunk laughed tiredly. Even Keith cracked a smile.

“The coolest,” Shiro reiterated.

They were all still present in each other’s minds and Lance’s happiness was infectious, despite the shared pain. Everyone was hurting; it was hard to tell where or who each pang was coming from, but mixed in with the tired and the hungry and the _ouch_ , and much more prevalent, was the feeling of pride.

They’d done it, and they’d done it together.

It was weird in Shiro’s head; the mind link always was. There was this part of him that kept on drilling in the fact that he was alone. Here, now, stumbling down the hallway to the cryopods, putting one arm around Keith and one around Hunk, on the verge of laughter, he’d never felt _less_ alone. Their voices in his head were telling him that he’d done a good job, that they were happy, that this pain wasn’t a mark of loss but marks of success.

It was foreign and all too familiar. It was the feeling of wiggling his toes as he fell into bed at the garrison; the feeling of a real, warm blanket wrapping around him and protecting him from _her_ ; the feeling of affirmation, of being told that he was more that a sum of his sorrows; the feeling of escape and of light and of freedom; the feeling of real velvet between his fingertips; the feeling of home. It was warmth and comfort and contentment.

He felt each of these people in his mind, he felt their smiles and their hopes and dreams and worries but none of them cared and somehow, it was _okay._ For the first time in a long time, Shiro was okay. Despite the rib that threatened to puncture his lung and the constant worry that even family couldn’t iron out, he was kind of actually okay.

Coran cheered them into the pods and Shiro actually followed. He hadn’t thought he would; he thought he’d just watch them all night and worry like the leader he was, but now he _felt_ them. He knew how much they cared. Through them, he felt his own self love grow. He saw Keith’s fear and protectiveness and saw it amplified many times over in each of his paladin’s minds.

They peeled off their armor in relative silence, but for once silence didn’t mean getting stuck in the back corners of his consciousness. It was just peace.

When the cold overtook him, he felt nothing but warmth.

It was just peace.

* * *

 

He breathed in the cold air. It filled his lungs. Exhale.

He opened his eyes and was greeted with four grins. He didn’t quite know who caught him as he stumbled out of the pod, but he knew four sets of arms were wrapped around him. As always, Lance was the first to speak.

“Nap time?”

Shiro nodded.

“Nap time.”

They flooded the common room and were pleased to find that the seating area had combined into one big, soft lying area. The Alteans knew what was important. Lance sprawled out first and Pidge curled in next to him, followed by Hunk and then Keith, too tired and emotionally drained to worry about getting too close to his teammates. Hunk patted the spot in-between him and Lance.

“Nap time, you said so.”

Shiro smiled, and for once, obliged. He carefully laid down between Lance and Hunk, trying not to touch or jostle anyone too much. Lance, already almost out of it, wrapped Shiro’s right arm with his left and Hunk pulled Shiro in closer.

Shiro relaxed into it. He closed his eyes like he hadn’t had to fight for control every time he did, like he remembered what sleep was like and liked the feeling of melting into the soft mattress. He wiggled his toes and breathed in the dusty floral nothingness.

He wasn’t alone anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> I had this beta read by like 8 people, but special thanks to [CrazyIndigoChild](http://archiveofourown.org/users/CrazyIndigoChild/pseuds/CrazyIndigoChild), [Aurum](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kyo_chan/pseuds/aurumdalseni), and my dear [melonbug](http://archiveofourown.org/users/melonbug/pseuds/melonbug). This is one of those fics that holds all my heart and soul and effort, please let me know what you think :)
> 
>  [Find me on tumblr for more of the same shenanigans <3](http://oldmythos.tumblr.com)


End file.
